I like the recipe analogy. What it makes me wonder is, I read somewhere that the reason recipes aren't patented is that an expert in the field knows that if you make something out of strawberries, it's going to end up tasting something like strawberries, and there's nothing really non-obvious to an expert about pretty much any recipe. So why wouldn't that same idea apply to things like business process patents, and design patents, and software patents?

rumpelstiltskin:I like the recipe analogy. What it makes me wonder is, I read somewhere that the reason recipes aren't patented is that an expert in the field knows that if you make something out of strawberries, it's going to end up tasting something like strawberries, and there's nothing really non-obvious to an expert about pretty much any recipe. So why wouldn't that same idea apply to things like business process patents, and design patents, and software patents?

Because then the legal firms that rigged the patent game to begin with would lose millions of dollars in billable hours every year?

The funny thing is that he was being snarky about people making that very claim. The next paragraph was:

By this myopic logic, Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity, Henri Poincaré had similar ideas before him, as did Hendrik Lorentz earlier still. And, come to think of it, Maxwell's equations contain all of the basic ingredients of relativity; Einstein "merely" found a way to combine them with another set of parts, Newtonian mechanics.

Mugato:Hmm. You're right about the date, but the Cylon you pictured is clearly from the original series.

No, the original picture was a Cylon Centurion Model 0005, from the original Cylon Wars. They were shown in the new BSG miniseries as a reference to the old series. Later in the new BSG series we saw several appearances of the "old style" Cylons, as flashbacks in the TV Movie "Razor", and in the finale of the new BSG, at the battle on the Cylon's colony world, we saw a number of them, including the ones that were fighting on Galactica's side.

Silverstaff:Mugato: Hmm. You're right about the date, but the Cylon you pictured is clearly from the original series.

No, the original picture was a Cylon Centurion Model 0005, from the original Cylon Wars. They were shown in the new BSG miniseries as a reference to the old series. Later in the new BSG series we saw several appearances of the "old style" Cylons, as flashbacks in the TV Movie "Razor", and in the finale of the new BSG, at the battle on the Cylon's colony world, we saw a number of them, including the ones that were fighting on Galactica's side.

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats:The grammar in the headline quote is really bugging me. I probably need to get out and take a walk.

I think the way it basically work is in British English, a company/corporation is plural as if it was a group of people: "they haven't invented anything." In American English, we view them as a single entity person: "he hasn't invented anything."

Mugato:but the Cylon you pictured is clearly from the original series.

The pic is from the Mini-Series in which the Colonial officer is waiting at Armistice Station reviewing historical documents from the First Cylon War, and thus the older model Centurion. It was done as an homage to the first series.

/Wow, I used to laugh at people who could quote Chapter and verse from Star Trek and Star Wars, and look me now.

ProfessorOhki:TheBeastOfYuccaFlats: The grammar in the headline quote is really bugging me. I probably need to get out and take a walk.

I think the way it basically work is in British English, a company/corporation is plural as if it was a group of people: "they haven't invented anything." In American English, we view them as a single entity person: "he hasn't invented anything."

It sounds odd, but it makes more sense. Wacky Brits.

Yeah. As I implied, it depends on how you regard "Apple", as either singular or plural. It's right up along the lines of how "Please do the needful" is proper, if archaic, English.

I'll say it beofre and I'll say it again. The Patent system is badly broken and while there are no quick fixes there are three things we could do tomorrow that would make things VASTLY better:

1) Reduce the time for tech patents to 5 years or less. 20 years is an absurd amount of time to hold a patent on anything tech related. 5 years is about two full generations of a product these days, and that's enough

2) Reverse the court decision that allowed the patenting of software code. Software should be protected by copyright, not patents so you can copyright how YOU implement a particular software function, but not the IDEA of that function or its "look and feel"

3) Allow companies to sue patent holders for "lost opportunity" costs if a patent is found to be overly broad or obvious, the companies who were chilled from entering the market because of that patent should be able to sue the holder

sure haven't:Can we trust a man who doesn't know how to properly use "haven't" and "hasn't"??

It's a British thing. Even when the name of a company or group of people uses a singular noun, it's seen as a reference to several people rather than an individual entity, and thus considered plural as far as verb conjugation is concerned.

rumpelstiltskin:I like the recipe analogy. What it makes me wonder is, I read somewhere that the reason recipes aren't patented is that an expert in the field knows that if you make something out of strawberries, it's going to end up tasting something like strawberries, and there's nothing really non-obvious to an expert about pretty much any recipe. So why wouldn't that same idea apply to things like business process patents, and design patents, and software patents?

An invention is obvious if one or more prior art references teach or suggest each and every element of the claims. In the case of recipes, strawberries are known, milk is known, sugar is known, and freezing while churning is known, so strawberry ice cream involving those things combined would be obvious. Basically, you're always using known materials in a predictable combination and not getting any unexpected results. It would be different if, say, you combined strawberries (known) and duck breast (known) and got a foaming stable hydrocolloid that tastes like mint (wtf?).

Why doesn't that apply to business methods and software? Because there's almost always going to be some element in the claims that isn't known. So it's strawberries+milk+chemical X+churning, and that's not obvious to someone who doesn't know anything about chemical X.

And why doesn't that apply to design patents? Because they're an entirely different animal, more like trade dress. There, the test is whether an ordinary observer would consider the prior art designs and the claimed inventive design substantially similar. The "best" analogy to strawberries would be that if an ordinary person can tell a strawberry and a cherry apart, then the strawberry isn't obvious to someone who knows about cherries. But that's a terribly analogy.

rumpelstiltskin:I like the recipe analogy. What it makes me wonder is, I read somewhere that the reason recipes aren't patented is that an expert in the field knows that if you make something out of strawberries, it's going to end up tasting something like strawberries, and there's nothing really non-obvious to an expert about pretty much any recipe. So why wouldn't that same idea apply to things like business process patents, and design patents, and software patents?

Because enforcement of the "non-obvious" part of the patent requires somewhat intimate knowledge of the topic at hand. With regard to design and software patents, that's not always possible as most people with intimate knowledge will be working in the field either creating or actively promoting such patents.

Patents have come a long way since the days of "hey, I figured out how to tie two wires together" and it takes more and more education and working knowledge to understand the inventions of today; something the patent office is not up to the task of.

Magorn:I'll say it beofre and I'll say it again. The Patent system is badly broken and while there are no quick fixes there are three things we could do tomorrow that would make things VASTLY better:

1) Reduce the time for tech patents to 5 years or less. 20 years is an absurd amount of time to hold a patent on anything tech related. 5 years is about two full generations of a product these days, and that's enough

a) Is this retroactive, or just for future patents?b) What about examination delays - are you proposing 5 years from issue?c) Should every industry have its own, unique patent duration? Like 5 years for "anything tech related" but 20 years for pharma? What about the automotive industry? What about toys? What about textiles? And should "tech related" be such a broad brush? What about operating systems vs. video games vs. machine vision vs. telecommunications algorithms? 5 years each, or different for each?

2) Reverse the court decision that allowed the patenting of software code. Software should be protected by copyright, not patents so you can copyright how YOU implement a particular software function, but not the IDEA of that function or its "look and feel"

And since there are thousands of ways to write code, you may have addressed piracy but have failed to address infringing competitors. So, as a result, each company would (a) happily steal from little inventors and indie developers, and (b) move everything to hosted services with locked down code and license agreements, and rely on trade secrets and contracts for protection... resulting in such protection lasting a lot longer than a mere 20 year patent term.I'm not sure this is a good result for consumers.

3) Allow companies to sue patent holders for "lost opportunity" costs if a patent is found to be overly broad or obvious, the companies who were chilled from entering the market because of that patent should be able to sue the holder

They can, it's called an action for declaratory judgement. But there's no damages involved, since there's no way that those damages could be foreseeable to a patent holder. So unless you're saying that due process should be thrown out, I don't think you've thought this through.

Theaetetus:Magorn: I'll say it beofre and I'll say it again. The Patent system is badly broken and while there are no quick fixes there are three things we could do tomorrow that would make things VASTLY better:

1) Reduce the time for tech patents to 5 years or less. 20 years is an absurd amount of time to hold a patent on anything tech related. 5 years is about two full generations of a product these days, and that's enough

a) Is this retroactive, or just for future patents?b) What about examination delays - are you proposing 5 years from issue?c) Should every industry have its own, unique patent duration? Like 5 years for "anything tech related" but 20 years for pharma? What about the automotive industry? What about toys? What about textiles? And should "tech related" be such a broad brush? What about operating systems vs. video games vs. machine vision vs. telecommunications algorithms? 5 years each, or different for each?

I realize you're trying to make the "it'll be so complicated" argument. But can you not at least agree that given the intent of patents, the length of protection should vary depending on the industry, application and product?

2) Reverse the court decision that allowed the patenting of software code. Software should be protected by copyright, not patents so you can copyright how YOU implement a particular software function, but not the IDEA of that function or its "look and feel"

And since there are thousands of ways to write code, you may have addressed piracy but have failed to address infringing competitors. So, as a result, each company would (a) happily steal from little inventors and indie developers, and (b) move everything to hosted services with locked down code and license agreements, and rely on trade secrets and contracts for protection... resulting in such protection lasting a lot longer than a mere 20 year patent term.I'm not sure this is a good result for consumers.

This is what mostly happens today anyway. I'm unfamiliar with the numbers but my gut guess -- and by all means it could be wrong -- is that software patents are more often claimed by large companies against other large companies than used by indie developers to protect their application.

imgod2u:Theaetetus: Magorn: I'll say it beofre and I'll say it again. The Patent system is badly broken and while there are no quick fixes there are three things we could do tomorrow that would make things VASTLY better:

1) Reduce the time for tech patents to 5 years or less. 20 years is an absurd amount of time to hold a patent on anything tech related. 5 years is about two full generations of a product these days, and that's enough

a) Is this retroactive, or just for future patents?b) What about examination delays - are you proposing 5 years from issue?c) Should every industry have its own, unique patent duration? Like 5 years for "anything tech related" but 20 years for pharma? What about the automotive industry? What about toys? What about textiles? And should "tech related" be such a broad brush? What about operating systems vs. video games vs. machine vision vs. telecommunications algorithms? 5 years each, or different for each?

I realize you're trying to make the "it'll be so complicated" argument. But can you not at least agree that given the intent of patents, the length of protection should vary depending on the industry, application and product?

Not at all. To paraphrase Judge Easterbrook, there's no "law of the horse". We don't have a separate tort law for torts committed in cars as opposed to torts on horseback, or torts committed while facing north, or torts committed on Tuesdays, because (i) the law is supposed to be efficient and pragmatic, and requiring different statutes or case law for every situation or industry would balloon it out to the point where no one could reasonably understand it (see, e.g. taxes); and (ii) listing protections that depend on industry would inherently create the potential argument that any new invention is actually a new, un-listed industry ("sure, it's 5 years on operating systems, but this is actually a hyper-parallel device subcomponent management method, so I should get the full 20 years as a new industry with no known life cycle").

It's also why, for example, 35 USC 101 lists the categories of "process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or improvement thereon" rather than "food, toy, medical device, vehicle, textile, chemical, transmitter, refrigerator, etc." Congress knew that, since you're talking about inventions, there's no way that you could reasonably specify narrow categories years in advance, because we have no idea what will be invented. Could someone in 1820 have predicted airplanes? Could someone in 1920 have predicted iPhones? Could someone in 1960 have predicted multiple virtual machines sharing the same physical hardware?

Legal systems need to be pragmatic. That's why you get a single drinking age, or a single driving age, even though individuals may have vastly different capabilities. It's not perfect, but it's certainly a better and more efficient system than requiring individual multi-year court cases for every person wanting a drink... or every inventor applying for a patent.

2) Reverse the court decision that allowed the patenting of software code. Software should be protected by copyright, not patents so you can copyright how YOU implement a particular software function, but not the IDEA of that function or its "look and feel"

And since there are thousands of ways to write code, you may have addressed piracy but have failed to address infringing competitors. So, as a result, each company would (a) happily steal from little inventors and indie developers, and (b) move everything to hosted services with locked down code and license agreements, and rely on trade secrets and contracts for protection... resulting in such protection lasting a lot longer than a mere 20 year patent term.I'm not sure this is a good result for consumers.

This is what mostly happens today anyway. I'm unfamiliar with the numbers but my gut guess -- and by all means it could be wrong -- is that software patents are more often claimed by large companies against other large companies than used by indie developers to protect their application.

Tell that to Microsoft, if they have any time between writing checks to i4i. ;)But no - indie developers with good IP protection usually sell to the big companies. Like the inventors of multitouch gestures at Fingerworks who sold to Apple.

SacriliciousBeerSwiller:justtray: Patent law is confusing. It's not surprising so many uneducated youths get so upset about it's application.

The term "patent" isn't even in TFA. But keep screaming at that wall...

Oh, come on... It's an article about whether Apple has invented anything and what it means to "invent", and it talks about the recent Samsung-Apple case, which was 90% on patents. Are you really telling us that you think discussing patents is off topic?